Part Three - Layer Masks

You will not believe how much easier your life will be when you get the hang of using layer masks. It's not as good as winning the lottery, but nearly. Of course, that's my humble opinion, your mileage may vary.

Layer masks come in really handy if you want to merge or blend more than one image together. I'm going to show you how to do it with a header, but the same techniques will work for icons or for any size graphic.

Today we are going to take two pics, which I've snagged from the net, and make them into one header. You can make yours with as many images as you wish.

Our final product needs to be 400 x 245 pixels with a resolution of 72 dpi. Your final product may need to be another size. So, open a new rgb document, whatever size you want your finished project to be. Add whatever you want your base color or texture to be. Mine looks like this:

Decide which image is going to be your main focal point, resize or crop it to fit within your base image, then copy/paste it into a new layer. Use the move tool to position the image exactly where you want it. Mine now looks like this:

Now, see the house behind John, and the hard edge where the photo ends on the left? We want to get rid of both of those things. To do that, we are going to use a layer mask. To add a layer mask, make sure the proper layer is highlighted, then click the "Add layer mask" button at the bottom of your layers palette. Let me show you what it looks like:

After you click that button, it will change the way your layer looks. It will look like this now:

Click on the white square, because we are actually going to be working on the layer mask now. Make sure black is your foreground and white is your background. Remember, white reveals, black conceals. Choose a soft edged brush of an appropriate size for what you are trying to remove from your graphic. Carefully paint over the areas you want to disappear. You may want to zoom in so you can see better. Sometimes, you are working along, being really careful on the edges, then suddenly your 'wild child' runs through the house and bumps your arm. Oops, a big streak through the middle of your image. No problem. Just change your foreground to white and paint over the area! That's what I love best about masking layers. You don't really 'get rid' of any portion of your picture. It's all still there and can be easily brought back now, or in the future. (Because we all know to save all our work in layers in .psd format, because we never know when we are going to want to come back and make changes, right?)

Here is what mine looks like so far. I reduced the opacity of the layer to 75% so that some of the blue from the base would show through, giving Mr. Lennon a bit of an ethereal look.

Now, you've probably already guessed that I am going to add the other image over to the left. You're just psychic like that! 8^). As you can see from the image below, I added my second picture.

You can't see, but I moved the layer under the previous layer, so that the first image overlaps this one. However, it shows a big ugly line there where it overlaps, and there is some other extra information there that I don't want. So, I make another new masking layer and, working carefully, I paint away the parts I don't want to see.

This is what it looks like. If I were really making this into a banner, I could now add my border, any text needed, any brushes or other textures wanted. I'm not going to do all that though, since this is really a masking tutorial.

Hints and Tips

When you are "painting away" portions of your image, you can reduce the flow and/or opacity of your brush in the options palette for different effects.

On the image above, after I added the second image and removed all the information I wanted to, I reduced the opacity of the layer. Even at only 15% though, John didn't let much of the background texture show through. So, I also needed to reduce the brightness and contrast of that image. To do that though, you have to go back to your layer palette and click on the image, rather than the layer mask beside it, because that is where you want to work.

That's it for layer masks. Very easy, yes? Much easier than trying to extract the images, and it looks better on the edges than selecting and deleting part of it. Plus, you get to keep your original image in case you want to change it all next week or next year.

Now let's go forth and learn about masking brushes, shall we?

Part One: Intro | Part Two: Quick Mask | Part Three: Layer Mask | Part Four: Mask Brushes

Tutorials Index